If you make a mistake, which of course you mustn't,

Don't be Elizabeth with Shakespeare taking notes.

Now here is a lesson in college freshman English.

But it isn't being queen, it is being almost no one,

That matters when you do wrong in modern history.

You might be my friend, probably you are my friend,

But having rhyme I'd be quick to put a curse on you.

O'Rahilly did it, you withered, and all who know you,

Some way of making your name ridiculous, or worse,

Till you would wish never to hear of yourself again.

The wrong is more ego than outgo stirred for color,

The meglomaniac mixing, a heavy haste of the hand.

I warn you. The sin is in the thinking it is no matter

What you think. That the mistake is in wasting coal.

That not answering letters is a sin, of omission.

That what you say in anger to children changes them

And destroys you. That the choices of giving in love

Are reckoned inexorably, inevitably, and in your name.

Simple. This is simple. Severe. This is less than severe.

Sentimental. It is sentimental. But do right and be damned.

Wind of the year's thought, a tide, you roll the world,

Surged up horizon in the future. Don't though you could,

Club us with continents. Your mistake wrongs us all

When you read nothing, vote nothing. You have power.

It is your habit of puttying up the clumsy errors

That bring ruin down on us, and I am no Shakespeare,

But had the enemy in my house, the clattering workman,

Only yesterday, the master of his words and nails.

I thought of Leonardo, I remember Wren and Wright,

Reached for Guttenberg's wooden letters, Rodin's wooden

Mallet, dreamed Jefferson's years making Monticello.

I opened my grandfather's soft-pine chest of drawers,

And laid a cruse on the man who re-hung my door crooked.